Civil-War England. Matthew Hopkins, lawyer and self-appointed 'Witchfinder General', tours the Eastern counties instigating witch-hunts and extracting 'confessions' under torture. When a young woman, Sara, is raped by Hopkins and his brutal assistant, John Stearne, and her priest father murdered, her lover, Richard, a soldier in Cromwell's army, vows revenge.

The last and best film of director Michael Reeves' tragically brief career,
Witchfinder General is one of a select few horror films to have transcended
their genre to win broad critical admiration - in Britain, perhaps only Peeping
Tom (d. Michael Powell, 1960) and The Wicker Man (d. Robin Hardy, 1971) have
been similarly favoured. All three films had to overcome native critics'
customary disdain for horror, and in the case of Witchfinder General, it took
Reeves' premature death for the film's visionary power to be fully
appreciated.

Released in May 1968, as unrest fomented in Paris and the hippie dream began
to darken, Witchfinder General tapped into the swelling anti-authority mood of
its time in its tale of Matthew Hopkins, whose real-life counterpart roamed a
Civil War-torn East Anglia, inflaming superstition and exploiting mistrust,
abetted (and generously paid) by local magistrates. But most impressive is the
way the film satisfies a horror audience while saying something quite profound
about the passive acceptance of violence and its corrupting power.

Reeves drew from Vincent Price (forced on him by US co-producers AIP; Reeves
had wanted Donald Pleasance) an uncharacteristically restrained performance that
accentuates Hopkins' inscrutable menace, fuelled by insincere piety and an
overwhelming misogyny: "strange, isn't it," he muses, "how much iniquity the
Lord invested in the female". Just as disturbing is the stony impassivity of the
villagers as they gaze on each new atrocity. In one memorable image, children
roast potatoes in the same flames that have just consumed another innocent
victim.

From its shocking opening sequence, in which a sun-dappled rural paradise is
disturbed by a hanging, Reeves counterpoints natural beauty with brutality and
cruelty, aided by John Coquillon's ravishing photography and by the splendour
of Suffolk's unspoiled towns and landscape.

Chief censor John Trevelyan demanded several cuts, despite Reeves' eloquent
defence. Nevertheless, many British critics, including writer Alan Bennett, were
disgusted with the film. In a further indignity, for its American release, AIP
bizarrely renamed the film The Conqueror Worm, in a vain attempt to associate it
with its own Poe series. A more serious intervention was, thankfully, overruled
- in place of Reeves' ending, in which both the hero, Richard, and his young
bride, Sara, are driven to the point of madness, AIP had wanted the couple, as
Reeves put it, "riding blissfully into the sunset". That, the director
acknowledged, really would have been a cut too far.